Of course, if customers choose give up personal information to a service provider as a matter of voluntary contract (e.g., for some promised benefits), then that's completely legitimate. But mandating such data collection is outside the proper scope of government.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Court stenographers normally record proceedings on both paper and digital disk. But Terlesa Cowart, stenographer at Chaviano's 2009 trial, forgot to bring enough rolls of paper and relied on digital recordings alone to chronicle proceedings. She transferred this data to her PC and erased it from the stenograph. Cowart has been fired for the monumental screw-up, The Miami Heraldreports.

Bad move. The PC subsequently became infected by an unidentified virus, causing the destruction of the records. No secure backup was taken, so the state will be put through the expense of a second trial that will cause, at the very least, inconvenience for witnesses and heartache for the victim's family.

The proponents of PIPA/SOPA are now regrouping and redoubling their efforts to force these egregious pieces of legislation into law by forcing a vote next week in the Senate called "Cloture", which in effect forces Senators to vote for a bill as written without debate or amendments. They are doing this as fast as possible because they know opposition is building and they still think they have the votes necessary to pass PIPA.

Although some Senators have said they are working to "fix" the bills to address some of our concerns, they may not get the chance.

It is imperative that we tell our Senators to vote NO on "Cloture". Please help spread the word, as this is a process most Americans are not familiar with, and need to understand if they are going to speak up in time.

For the fourth year in a row, more LPs were sold than in any other year in the SoundScan era; last year, sales soared to 3.9 million, up from 2.8 million LPs in 2010. Of the 228 million physical albums sold in 2011, nearly 2% were vinyl. Two-thirds of those albums were purchased at independent music stores.

[A] group of MIT researchers will present a new algorithm that, in a large range of practically important cases, improves on the fast Fourier transform. Under some circumstances, the improvement can be dramatic — a tenfold increase in speed.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

For the Museum of Modern Art's Talk to Me exhibit, MIT's SENSEable City Lab created a piece composed of 40 laptops that were sent all over the world and programmed to transmit data and images from their environments back to MIT. Fast forward some months and one of those laptops had entered common usage at the Lab. It was left on a desk and stolen in a burglary. (Of all the luck!) How do you think this crime caper might end? This is a story with a moral, after all.

Friday, January 13, 2012

We broke down the trajectories of 17 tablets from CES 2011. In the final tally, I think you could say one is a qualified success (the Asus Eee Pad Transformer), one did OK (the Motorola XOOM), and several flopped (Dell Streak, RIM Playbook) or made no impact (Coby Kyrus, Cydle M7 Multipad, Naxa NID-7001). Nine never were heard from again.

Astronomers said Wednesday that each of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way probably has at least one companion planet, adding credence to the notion that planets are as common in the cosmos as grains of sand on the beach.

"Planets are the rule rather than the exception," said lead astronomer Arnaud Cassan at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris. He led an international team of 42 scientists who spent six years surveying millions of stars at the heart of the Milky Way in the most comprehensive effort yet to gauge the prevalence of planets in the galaxy...

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I especially liked the story Vladimir Yourkevitch, who fled Russia after the Communist takeover and had to take a job in France as a riveter in the Renault factory. The image of an poor immigrant factory worker trying to persuade the chairman of a major French shipyard that his revolutionary new ship hull design would work is something straight out of fiction. That ship would later set a Transatlantic speed record.

Researchers at Samsung have developed a smart phone that can detect people's emotions. Rather than relying on specialized sensors or cameras, the phone infers a user's emotional state based on how he's using the phone.

For example, it monitors certain inputs, such as the speed at which a user types, how often the "backspace" or "special symbol" buttons are pressed, and how much the device shakes. These measures let the phone postulate whether the user is happy, sad, surprised, fearful, angry, or disgusted...

Now if it will also stop you from sending that Facebook post or Tweet until you've cooled down sufficiently...

The WSJ caption reads: "An angiogram shows the ruined veins in pro yo-yoist Dave Schulte's index finger." FWIW, it looks more like an arteriogram to me, rather than a venogram. More from the yoyo-ist here. (Image link via @shlevy)

Each lens is able to changes its molecular structure, changing the focus as needed. There is a transparent LCD layer to the lens that with the accelerometer detecting motion, sending a signal to the LCD layer. This changes how light is refracted and is comparable to the varying thickness of traditional glasses.